My Favorite Dozen Couples from the Musical Stage

I have written about all sorts of favorite TV couples, married and unmarried. Now I think it is time to examine Broadway and environs for another set. I am such an unabashed fan of a good show, I am not going to split hairs as to quality. These are all fascinating couples in excellent shows. If any of these productions come to your area in a community or repertory context, I would advise you to acquaint yourself with the show, if you have not seen it already. No junk is being fobbed here.

What I will do instead is rank these couples in chronological order from when their shows opened on Broadway. That seems fair, does it not? Now, without further preamble, let's have a look at the first six.

1. Will and Ado Annie from Oklahoma (1943)

Many of the best musicals do not just have one love story for the romantic leads. In some cases, the supporting players' stories are more interesting and enjoyable. This show is a prime example.

Each of these secondary characters-the respective best friends of Curly and Laurie, the leads-has an excellent song to sing, early on. Will has the show-stopping song-and-dance number, "Kansas City," while Annie has the wonderful song, "I'm Just a Girl Who Cain't Say No," which, to my way of thinking is so much nicer and more poetic than if the composers (Rogers and Hammerstein) had gone with the simpler, equally accurate, "I'm Just a Slut."

Annie's dad (whom I played in a production of the show) hates the idea of her daughter marrying some damn cowboy, so he sets a condition that Will cannot get his consent until he can show fifty-dollars cash money. Will gets the 50 from a rodeo, but has a dickens of a time holding on to it, all of which lends the show a fine comedic touch.

2. Fred and Lilli from Kiss Me, Kate(1948)

This is a case where the leading man and lady are the more intriguing romance. That is not to say that the secondary characters, Lois and Bill, do not have anything going with theirs. Lois (as the character Kate's younger sister, Bianca, has the wonderful lament to her louse of a boyfriend, "Why Can't You Behave?" And Bill, the sinned-against and sinning boyfriend has the very amusing song "Bianca," pronounced "Bee-YANK-a," so as to rhyme with Sanka.

Fred (Graham) and Lilli (Vanessi) are a divorced couple who have been thrown together in a musical production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Insofar as they are playing Petruchio and Katherine, the leads in the Shakespeare play, they find themselves courting again, within the play, even as they bicker behind the scenes. The two also have some wonderful songs from perhaps Cole Porter's best musical score ever, but it is the book, written by Sam and Bella Spewack, that makes them such an enjoyable couple to watch.

All during the first act, when Lilli is obdurate in her disdain for her ex-husband, she clearly gets the best of the witty dialogue between the two. In the second act, when her armor begins to crack, it is Fred who becomes the soul of wit, while his ex is hardly more than the soul of confusion. By the time Lilli, as Katherine, sings the song "I Am Ashamed that Women are so Simple" (Listen to the song before you pass judgment. The music is by Porter, but the lyrics are by the Bard himself.), you get the strong impression she means it...at least to an extent.

3. Emile and Nellie in South Pacific (1949)

In an earlier content call, I made a list of my twenty favorite Break-up Songs. Number five on that list was the wonderfully touching ballad Emil de Becque sings, This Nearly Was Mine. He sings that song, because he has just lost what he hoped would be his last great love: Nurse Nellie Forbush, but, then, this is a Broadway musical-a Rogers and Hammerstein musical at that-so you have to figure those two kids will work things out in the end.

Well, they do, but it sure isn't easy. The show is set within the American Pacific campaign during World War II. Emile comes so close to being killed that Nellie assumes he is dead at one point toward the end of the show. In fact, another character the audience has built up some empathy for does get killed, and Emile is with him at the time.

What I liked in particular about this couple was the way they bear out how opposites can and often do attract. She is a young navy nurse from Arkansas, while he is an older widower with two children. She is all for doing her patriotic bit in the war, while he wants no part of it, at least at the outset of the show. And on top of these differences, throw in a number of obstacles, and you end up with the perfect Broadway couple...FINALLY!

4. Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide from Guys and Dolls (1950)

Nathan Detroit is an archetypal New York, hustler, gambler and promoter whose two main objects in life are arranging (illegal) crap games (from which he gets a generous cut) and avoiding marriage to his girlfriend, Miss Adelaide. A phrase you may have heard elsewhere originated in this show, when the leading lady, Sister Sarah Brown, asks Adelaide when she and Nathan are going to be married. She replies, "The twelfth of never!" The unfortunate lady is even more explicit about her frustration in one of the show's best numbers: Adelaide's Lament.

This is another of those shows where I was more interested in the secondary characters' romance than the leads, not that Sky Masterson and Sister Sarah are at all boring. It's a top-notch show all-around and may well be the most performed musical of all in reparatory.

5. Hinezie and Gladys from The Pajama Game (1954)

Okay, maybe I'm a little biased here, since I got to play the role of Hinezie (a/k/a Vernon Hines) in a production of this show, and I had a blast. Still, these are some very well-drawn characters, and the actors who get a chance to bring them to life, wherever they may be, are fortunate indeed.

Oddly enough, Hines (the Sleep-Tite Pajama Company's "time-study man") and Gladys (the boss's secretary) do not have any musical numbers together. Those are reserved for the leads. Still, they have some of the best songs in the show. Gladys, acting every bit the turncoat, performs the hot song and dance number, Steam Heat, during a garment-workers' union rally. Later, while trying to seduce the leading man (It's a long story.), she sings the crossover hit song, "Hernando's Hideaway."

Hinezie, for his part, has a wonderful duet with the leading man's secretary, Mabel, called, I'll Never Be Jealous Again, and, yes, when I did the role, it included the dance break at the end. Not step-for-step what you will see in the linked video (from the movie), but complex enough that my partner and I had to rehearse it about 1,628,593 times and at least thrice before every performance. But it was worth it. Another great number he has in the second act, which serves no purpose whatsoever except to create a lot of fun, is called "Think of the Time I Save." Sadly, they cut that one out of the movie.

There is dialogue between Hinezie and Gladys, though. My favorite scene between them is when the insanely (but not unreasonably) jealous Hines accuses his girlfriend of taking a love note to the leading man. When he finally makes her show what the paper says, it turns out to be that week's payroll. After he gets a look at it, Gladys adds, "That means 'I love you' in the Morris code!"

In the teeth of all logic, Hinezie and Gladys get married at the end of the show.

6. Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady (1956)

This show, which, in its time, broke records for longevity, made the career of Julie Andrews, who had actually been an entertainer since she was a child, but, through My Fair Lady, became a very well-known and in-demand entertainer.

What I like about this couple is that they never are a couple in the sense you would expect, throughout the show. It is only at the very end that you get the hint that they might-mind you, might-finally have become aware of their feelings for each other.

The show is based on George Bernard Shaw's excellent play, Pygmalion. I have seen the play, and it certainly stands on its own as a superb evening's entertainment, but, when you add in perhaps the best score that the team of Lerner and Loewe ever produced, it is no wonder the show ran so long.

The premise of these two characters' pairing is that, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) is appalled at the way common Londoners mangle the English language, especially when their casual treatment of it keeps them forever mired in the lower class.

One thing leads to another, and he ends up making a bet with his colleague, Colonel Pickering, that he can take a common woman from the street and turn her into what would pass for a lady, with his impeccable training in the proper art of the language. And of course, the flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews) ends up as his live-in student.

It's not as though Higgins is exploiting the girl for cheap labor, for he has an extensive domestic staff (one of whom I played in a production of the show). On the other hand, she is, at first, nothing more to him than an intriguing experiment.

The going gets difficult for them at the very beginning, which Eliza shows in her hot-tempered song, "Just You Wait." Higgins, for his part, vents his frustrations in the song titled "I'm an Ordinary Man," but which most of us think of as "Let a Woman in Your Life."

The plot is helped and hindered along by Eliza's ne'er-do-well father, Alfie Doolittle, but, in the end, she leaves Higgins, presumably to marry an ardent suitor. Finally, toward the end of the show, he sings one of my favorite show tunes of all, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face.

I ended up using a link from the movie version, since, while many stage productions are excellent, most videos of them are, for one reason or another, poor. In the film, the producers threw Ms. Andrews over in favor of Audrey Hepburn. It was somewhat of an irony, then, in the year the film of My Fair Lady was up for consideration, Julie Andrews won the Oscar for best lead actress in Mary Poppins.

Okay, let me stop here, with half the delightful dozen under wraps...and we're only up to 1956. I will launch a later essay that has six possibly more modern couples, with many of the same issues and some new ones that had not been thought of yet by the spinners of Broadway's greatest musicals.

Support your local theater company, if you have one. You will probably be glad you did.

Sources

Wikipedia

YouTube

Own performance and observation